Fear and Loathing
by sophia-rey
Summary: Kylo and Rey struggle to understand the powers they have been gifted with ... and the power they have on each other. What began as an interrogation room one shot is now continued, in varying levels of chronological order/canon. Thank you so much for your kind reviews! (This is an unashamed Reylo, but a rather slow burn.)
1. Chapter 1

She woke with a start.

The restraints were looser than she remembered them being before she had passed out from screaming and fighting to break free. The sweat that had drenched her body was now dried, leaving chills wracking her small frame.

"Are you refreshed now?" The booming voice seemed to enter her skull - her stomach dropped. As the creature in the mask approached her, she began to struggle again, her screams giving way to guttural growls. "Let me go! Why won't you let me go?" Her chest was heaving, her breath accelerating - a sick sense of entrapment washed over her as the creature put out a hand as if to strike her. Searing pain filled her head.

… she was screaming, her tears flooding her face so quickly she felt she might drown. She wanted to drown. "Come back! Come back! Mum, dad!" But the starship was gone. She collapsed in a heap on the sand, her tears mixing with the earth. If only she could bury herself and die but a hand roughly grabbed her leg and began to drag her ...

… towards her home in the abandoned AT-AT. She watched the sun dip into the west, and felt the golden rays caress her …

… as she watched the droid project a map into the starship's interior -

Her head snapped back onto the restraint so quickly she felt it might split open. The creature growled. "You've seen it! Tell me where it leads!"

Defeat flooded her. "How am I supposed to talk to a creature in a mask?" she spat out. The creature pulled back. A hiss, then a thud.

She stared, astonished.

He was so young. And so frightened. He was trying to project an aura of steely resolve, but somehow she could sense his fear and unease. A new power surged through her. There were his emotions. She pushed further - there were his memories - and suddenly she was in his soul. A boy looking up at a shrine, a schoolteacher raining blows down on his back, a mother crying - and anger. So much anger. She reached deeper, but was thrust back. His hands were pressing her into the metal, her head was again searing. "Stop!" His dark eyes were frightened.

"You have no regard for my soul! Why should I have regard for yours?"

"It hurts me too, you know." His voice without the mask was deep but trembling. "Tell me where it leads!"

"I would rather die," she spat.

"That can be arranged," he said, a sneer spreading across his face as he plunged into her head once again, invading all that she knew. She couldn't breathe. The memories were racing through her mind, and she felt him observing and scoffing and … sympathizing? Could that truly be a sympathetic thought? She took hold of the weakness and pushed him back out.

Frustration dripped from his frame as he took a sharp breath. "Give it to me," she said. Was he imploring? "Give it to me and the pain will stop." The pain. _Our_ pain. He was begging her. She felt a wall come down as he stretched out his hand once again. It was gone.

He was wiping away her tears now, his hand softly gliding over her face. She felt emotion growing inside her chest - a warm glow beginning to blossom. She looked up at him and saw the anger vanished. He looked puzzled, swept up into his own world - a world revolving around only her. As his fingers followed the line of her jaw, an electric bolt seemed to overtake her. The emotion she couldn't name, that felt like a match to his, began to unfold slowly in her chest. His hands found her lips. What was this feeling? All she knew was that it was beginning to be too much to bear ...

As his hand traced her lips, she seemed to wake anew.

Revulsion filled her stomach at what had overcome her. As his fingers began their journey again, she thrust her head forward and bit down. Her mouth filled with blood as he leapt back and cursed, then lunged for her neck. The anger cascaded through her bones and she felt herself begin to die. She was slipping into unconsciousness when he suddenly let go. She was already enmeshed into a swirling blackness as the door slammed shut.


	2. Chapter 2

The blood from his wounded hand left a trail behind him. It dripped, slowly, onto the shiny tile floor, splattered onto the wall as he reflexively used the force to knock out of his way anyone who happened to walk near him, and fell through the metal grating that made up the bridge. A droid, gliding about his tasks below, stopped short when he felt his casings suddenly slick with blood now cooled from its rapid descent.

Kylo could barely see his surroundings. The door was hardly closed before he was screaming profanity and slamming his fists into the wall with a rage so deep it threatened to consume him completely.

And _why could it not?_ It was all that he wanted.

Despair and resentment washed over him. Weak now, his rage spent, he stumbled blindly towards the table that held his grandfather's helmet. He was on his knees, his hands folded. His vision blurred and he closed his eyes, realizing that his sight had not been clouded by rage … but by tears.

Despair turned to shame. He let out a guttural cry.

"Grandfather. Forgive me!" He was weeping, shuddering. "I feel it again."

He couldn't say it.

Visions flashed through his mind. He saw his mother smiling down at him as he learned of his powers. He couldn't have been more than four or five. In her smile, he saw pride. But her smile was too big – forced. In her eyes, Kylo saw her true emotion: a deep fear. This fear was made manifest a few years later, when he discovered his powers could be mixed with rage to create something lethal. His mother's droid was in a thousand pieces on his bedroom floor when Leia entered to see him in the corner, seething.

"How dare you!" she screamed at him. "How DARE you use this power in this way!" Her disgust was palpable – his soul was drenched in it. In that moment, all Kylo wanted to do was to make his mother proud again. He would do almost anything to fix what he had done, to right the impulse towards good. But instead of crying with remorse and begging for forgiveness, he felt the rage overtake him once more, and, chin jutted and fists clenched, watched as his mother flew several feet at the impact, her body hitting the wall and then falling to the floor in a heap.

Never since had he been more ashamed of his pull to the darkness.

Never … until the moment he had tried to kill the scavenger.

"I feel it," he whispered to his grandfather. "The pull to the light."

 _Why_ was his grandfather dead? Why now, when he desperately needed guidance? He had never met him, but Leia's stories about her father had revealed a man of deep conviction and resolve. "He was a good man," she said when recounting stories to him."But his soul was twisted. He gave in to the siren song of the dark." A young Kylo nodded then. But he knew that he understood something his mother did not – that the siren song sometimes grew so loud in his ears that he thought his very soul might explode at the base need of it.

"Show me again the power of the darkness," he prayed. He needed to relive his pain. He needed to feel it again, untainted by the sick desire he had felt, if only so briefly, to see the scavenger live … to feel the scavenger's touch … to _know_ her. Deeply. To know what it was that she knew-

His rage began to mount, like the coloration of his cheeks, as he reacted against the pull of the light.

"Show me, Grandfather," he said. He scrambled suddenly to his feet, towering over the ashy remains. "Show me. And I will finish what you started." It was a vow. His breathing settled, his heart slowed.

Filled with a new resolve, he wiped his eyes.

As his tears mingled with the blood from his wounded hand, his vision turned red.


	3. Chapter 3

_Rey stood in the middle of the forest ridge, her arms outstretched to heaven and her countenance seemingly transfixed by a radiant light that seemed to find a very reason to exist purely in her being. She was a creature of this light, completely, through to her very bones. Indeed, she burned so bright that he could barely gaze on her. As if in answer, she lowered her eyes and, her eyes smiling, reached towards him._

 _"Come on, Ben!" she called, laughing. Her smile was like the sun._

 _His heart flooded with warmth, and he started towards her - but his feet refused to move. Confused, he tried again ... but still his feet seemed to be outside of his control. The black void seemed to swallow him as he screamed her name …_

… and awoke, drenched in sweat and the cool light of the galaxy outside his window. The officer was peering down at him fearfully.

"I'm so very sorry to awaken you, sir," the man said, his voice trembling.

"What the hell do you want?" Kylo barked, pulling the sheets around him. Normally he would be using the force to send the man across the room and laughing as his body hit the opposite wall and crumbled at the impact … but somehow the warmth from the dream still had its fingers wrapped around his chest and held him back, if ever so tenuously from his rage. "She's gone, sir."

"Who's gone?"

"The girl, sir. The scavenger."

Kylo veritably jumped to his feet, flinging the door open and sending the man flying through it in an instant. How could she be gone? He was seething as he pulled clothes on as fast as he could, his anger mounting with every second. It wasn't just that the hunt had gotten away.

It was that the hunt had something that he wanted.


	4. Chapter 4

She was a rat in a maze. Every turn she took seemed to have a Stormtrooper at its end, but somehow each soldier obeyed her trembling orders. She was dumbfounded. _What_ was happening to her? The hangar was frigid, but beads of sweat covered her entire body, causing the delicate hairs on her arms to rise as she began to understand with every step the monumental gravity of her situation. Sure, she'd escaped. But she might as well still be imprisoned. How was she going to get out of here, and back to Finn and Han Solo?

 _One foot in front of the other_ , she thought to herself, a mantra picked up from her seemingly endless days of scavenging in Jakku's dusty heat. Her throat throbbed at each swallow, Ren's fingertips a ghostly presence even now. The anger spurred her on. _One foot in front of the other._ A sudden warmth flooded her stomach, and she raised her chin in defiance. _I piloted the Millenium Falcon with none other than Han Solo_. No one was going to get in her way-

"Stop right there!"

The blaster's tip was resting just under her collarbone. _Her blaster,_ wrenched somehow from her grasp. In her prideful reverie, she had missed the Stormtrooper hidden in the shadows.

"You will remove this blas-" she began, but was interrupted by a scoffing laugh as a second soldier grabbed her from behind and covered her mouth with his gloved hand. She began to kick, bite and claw at him but the other soldier quickly helped to restrain her. She felt like a doll in their hands – ashamed, tired, and weak.

"You will come with us," the first stormtrooper said, mockingly," and be _torn apart_ by Lord Ren."

The second soldier laughed scornfully. "You've got another think coming if you think your little Jedi mind tricks will be any match for him!" The terror in her chest became overwhelming, and she began again to fight as hard as she could, but she was no match for even these troopers. She was going to die. She prayed that the swirling blackness would take her more quickly this time, and less painfully-

Suddenly dropped, she collapsed to the floor in a heap and saw both soldiers to either side of her, dead.

"Rey!" Finn brought her to her feet, his blaster tossed aside and his eyes filled with tears, and pulled her into a tight embrace.

"How did you get here?" Rey gasped, as much in surprise as need for air. Chewbacca, looking quite emotional himself said gently that it was Finn's idea. Rey pulled out of the embrace to take Finn's face gently in her hands. "Your idea!"

He blushed then, changing the subject. "How did you get away?"

"I can't explain it," Rey said. Indeed, she couldn't. She barely understood this power herself. "And even if I did, you wouldn't believe it."

* * *

Humiliation colored Kylo's cheeks a deep crimson. He walked swiftly, searching for the girl, every step bringing with it a mounting terror that she was gone for good. Strangely, the thought of his certain punishment at Snoke's hands when she was declared to be escaped almost did not bother him at all. If he wasn't allowed to know her … well. He would rather be dead.

"Ben!"

He stopped short. His blood, already chilled, turned instantly to solid ice at the sound of his father calling his name.

"Han Solo," he said, as coolly as he could, turning to face his father. "I have been waiting for this day."

His father was decrepit. His hair, once dark and handsome, was white. He was still wearing the same vest he had always worn. What was this, some feeble attempt to be the man he aspired to be?

"Take off the mask, Ben," his father said. His voice wined in Kylo's ear like a drone.

He sneered. "What do you think you'll see if you do?"

The old man seemed pained. "The face of my _son_."

Kylo scoffed at this, reaching up to take off the mask. "Your son is gone," he said, lifting the heavy mask off and letting it fall to the floor. The crash echoed around the hangar. "Your son was weak and foolish. Very much like his father was. I _destroyed_ him."

Han's jaw clenched at this. "He wants you to believe this, Ben," he pleaded. "It's not true. My son is alive."

And it wasn't true.

In the furthest reaches of his worn out heart, he knew it wasn't true. He knew his real name.

 _Ben_.

At night he heard his mother weeping, calling out his name. He saw himself as a child, realizing the extent of his terrible actions that one day he lost control, and picking up her broken body from the floor and cradling it in his arms. "Mother," he wept, his tears falling like a spring rain her face, on the floor, on the pieces of the droid strewn so haphazardly about. _Ben_! It was an agonized cry.

But hadn't he killed Ben? Hadn't he destroyed him once and terribly for all?

"The supreme leader is wise," Kylo said, gathering his resolve around him firmly.

It was Han's turn to scoff now. "He is only using you for your power, Ben! Once he gets what he wants, he will crush you."

Kylo faltered backwards at this. Han was speaking what Kylo had long known, but was too stubborn to give into. He shook his head. "It's too late …" Kylo trailed off.

"It's not too late. Come home with me, Ben. I _love_ you. Your mother loves you. She wants to see you!"

Kylo's stomach turned in revulsion at the old man's begging, but underneath the revulsion he knew the truth of what his father said. He desperately yearned for his father to take him away, to take him home.

But this simply could not be. How could he go home now? How could he face the people who knew what he had done? No. He wouldn't let Han Solo, of all people, prove him to be a liar. He was stronger than his father. As if to prove it, he tapped into the old man's head, enjoying the look of sudden, intense pain on his face. He read his thoughts quickly, obtaining the map out of duty, but swiftly moving back and back until he reached what he wanted …

 _The young Ben was still weeping over his mother's unconscious form when Han entered the room. Instantly, he wrestled Leia from Ben's grasp, and began to scream at him. "What have you done? What the hell have you done to her?" Ben covered his ears, rocking back and forth, his sobs convulsing his small frame. "It wants me, father," he cried out, between guttural sobs. "It won't let me go."_

 _"Then fight HARDER_ , _Ben!" Han screamed. "You are stronger than this. How could you do this to your mother?" When Ben looked up, he saw no compassion in his father's face. He saw only disappointment … and fear._

"It won't let me go, father," Kylo said, releasing the old man from his vice grip. Han stumbled back, then forward again, until he was touching Kylo's arm.

"It's not too late," Han said. This time, the disappointment was gone, replaced with empathy.

Kylo swallowed. He was ready to go home, ready to see his mother again. Ready to lay at her feet and beg her forgiveness. He was ready-

"I'm being torn apart, father."

"Let me take it, Ben."

"I want to be free of this pain, father. I can't take this pain anymore."

"It's over, Ben. We can go home now."

"It's over …" Ben echoed. Suddenly he was hit with a violent, nauseating force, so strong that he rocked backwards. Confusion flashed across Han's face, and he reached out and steadied his son. Tears, unbidden, came to Ben's eyes then. Humiliation surged through him, like a poison.

"I know what I need to do," Kylo said, without looking at the old man. "Will you help me with something, father?"

"Of course! Anything." His father was desperate. His stomach turned. In the embrace, he felt the old man's surprising strength. He pulled him closer and closer, wishing with all his might that Han could take him away to the warm arms of his mother …

With Leia's face firmly in his mind, Kylo ran the saber through his father's frail frame. As Han suddenly understood, Kylo retracted the blade and let his father fall into the void. _Free at last …_

As he watched his father's form grow smaller and smaller, a disquiet grew larger and larger in his soul.

He sank to the floor.

The torment he felt was almost as violent as Rey's screams from above.


	5. Chapter 5

_"Such is the Force of Happiness—_  
 _The Least—can lift a Ton_  
 _Assisted by its stimulus—_

 _Who Misery—sustain—_  
 _No Sinew can afford—_  
 _The Cargo of Themselves—_  
 _Too infinite for Consciousness'_  
 _Slow capabilities."_

Dickinson

What had he done? Horror swept through him like a tornado, engulfing his very being. Regret replaced the blood in his veins. But how? This act should have severed him from the hold of the light completely. Instead it was as if the pull had grown in magnitude by tenfold.

Dizzy from the blood loss due to injuries sustained from the fight scene he had just fled, he staggered through the woods.

 _Where was the girl?_

A rustling in the trees – and her lightsaber was at his neck, his on the ground, pushed out of his hand with a force so strong he was in shocked surprise. She was shaking, because of the frigid embrace of the snow now billowing around them, but with a rage so deep and holy he felt that he could not stand to be in her presence much longer. She steadied herself, her lightsaber still at his neck, and gathered resolve.

"Why, Ben?" Her lips uttering his name – his real name – brought him cold chills.

"Don't call me that."

She acted as if she had not even heard. Suddenly a pain ripped through his head so intense that he staggered and fell to his knees. She was in his head. With care, she looked through his every thought, stopping only when she came upon the memory that had been haunting him. "You are so very lonely," she said. "And scared." He saw compassion flicker in her eyes. She felt each emotion as they both relieved him plunging the lightsaber deeper and deeper into Han's chest … horror washed over her body visibly, then tears. "It's tearing you apart?" she asked. She came towards him then, and reached out her hand to brush it tenderly across his face. "Let me help you," she whispered.

Suddenly he had her against the tree. "Why would I want to turn to the light?" he sneered, "Why, when it makes you drop your guard like you just did?" He held her firmly, one arm across her shoulders and the other restraining her hands. But she seemed calm still, even serene.

"Because," she said, "it calls to you. You can't resist it, not for much longer. Let it take over you, Ben."

He tensed. "You don't know what you're saying."

"But I do. This might be too much for you. But it's not too much for _us_."

The desire that he had felt so strongly in the interrogation room was rising again in his bones. The force between them was growing stronger by the second, and he could not breathe. He was a boat in a tempest-tossed ocean, and he wished more than anything to allow her to captain the ship. When she lifted her head to meet his, he didn't resist. Her lips felt like fire and ice. He began to lift his hold, as the emotion worked through them both, the passion so strong that he felt as if it might consume them in a flame. She broke away from his lips, and found his ear. "Ben," she said, so softly that her words felt like just another of the snowflakes that was encircling them. "Let me help you."

He pulled her down into the drifts, and his heart, minutes before so broken that he didn't feel as if there could possibly be a number to the pieces that were scattered, seemed, ever so slightly, to mend in the heat of their embrace.


	6. Chapter 6

"Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves."

-Esquivel

* * *

She was all fire.

The force was a halo around them, as much pushing her away from him as pushing her deeper into his embrace. The electricity, so present that it seemed to be the very air they were breathing, veritably crackled.

"Do you feel it?" he whispered, breaking away from her lips, one hand running his fingers through her hair, and the other holding him ever so slightly above her.

"How could I feel anything else?" she whispered back, pulling him down again, working her own fingers through his dark and tousled hair. Slowly, carefully, she felt him open his mind to her. She entered, tentatively, seeing what he was showing her. _The interrogation room. Her captured frame. His feeling of shame. His confused need. His desperate longing for help._ She pulled away, rolling over in the snow, so that they were laying side by side. Keeping his trusting gaze, she gave him her thoughts too.

After a moment, she pulled away, watching the memories dance in his mind.

"I felt the same," she breathed out, the heat from her breath forming clouds that danced around them. As if awoken, they both seemed to understand how cold they really were. He pulled her close, then to her feet. "You're freezing," he exclaimed, through his own chattering teeth. "Oh you're almost blue!" Unfastening his jacket, he draped it over her shoulders. "Come," he said, leading her towards the base. Through frozen lips, she protested.

"What will you say, Ben?"

"That I found you. I do what I want, Rey. No one will think twice."

She stiffened. "And did you capture me?"

A laugh. "After this, you doubt?" he questioned. "It's you who captured me."

* * *

Gasping for breath, he woke from a nightmare. His mother, hurled again and again against the wall, her body falling each time harder and harder. He lifted his hands. In the dark, he thought he could make out the blood that must cover them.

She curled towards him, placing her head on his chest. Her fingers wiped away his tears, so gently. "Shhh," she breathed, barely awake. "The dark can't take you. I'm here." She drifted again, into a deep and peaceful slumber – but not before she had left him with a picture. The island was surrounded by a beautiful ocean. The deep waters were peaceful and serene, the waves untouched by storms. The blue of the ocean quieted his soul, and he relaxed.

Pulling her closer and resting his weary eyes, he drifted into her quiet sea.


End file.
